Kludge and Hack (1996) were two Real-World Interface B14 robots used on the "Behavior-Based Robotics" course created by the Autonomous Mobile Robot Group, Northwestern University.
"The first four years of the course were taught with two Real-World Interface B14 systems, which we had shortened to increase mechanical stability at high speeds. The robots were controlled by a custom DSP/framegrabber combination (the DIdeas Cheap Vision Machine), for which we wrote a boot ROM with a variety of active vision subroutines and a simple LISP interpreter for scripting and debugging. LCD displays were mounted on top of the robots to display debugging information. These systems were probably the easiest of all our robots to program. You turned one on, pushed reset, and it was booted and ready to go within 500ms. If your program crashed, you dropped into a debugger. If the actual hardware crashed, there was a freespace follower in ROM that you could use to herd it back to home base. An important feature of this system was that the Lisp interpreter had a number of hard-coded safeguards to prevent students from damaging the robot. It implemented acceleration and velocity caps that could not be overridden. It also had low-voltage and over-current interrupts that would kill the students' programs if they tried to abuse the batteries. However, a serious disadvantage of the machine was that you could only conveniently program with the on-board Lisp interpreter. Writing new vision operators required off-board compilation and linking of C code, which was then burned into a ROM and tested. This is not for the faint of heart." – A Laboratory Course in Behavior-Based Robotics.
